Are you put off by an article's bad spelling ? Do you forget its relevancy for the same reason ? Worse still, would you give a candidate a job if his CV (Resumé) consists of spelling errors ? I ranted about this in my original post, and it seems this same subject has been picked up by the BBC as something that affects a larger number of people too.

Employers view this as a measure of the candidate's outlook on life and their attitude to the job itself. Feedbacks to this article indicate this is a failure in the education system itself. I must admit this is a top annoyance for me when I plough through the web these days. Sure, I have my share of mistakes and typos on stuff I wrote too (this could be attributed to years of bashing the keyboard instead of pen and paper), I still make a conscious decision to review the words I type twice before clicking that "Send" button. Of these employers who reject candidates because of badly written CVs, I'd wager a large majority of them do not fare any better when it comes to their own CVs.

I am not defending the bad spellers, in fact, I am guilty of the same charge when it comes to CV filtering. You are faced with a pile of similarly worded documents, so to pick them apart, you tend to look for something that can differentiate between them. In the old days, people used to go for handwriting, which is an excellent gauge of the candidate's suitability. These days, with the computer generated CVs, employers unfortunately no longer have that advantage, so the next best thing is the spelling and grammatical errors.

Is this an indication of the degradation in standards ? Or is it just the attitude and outlook of today's generation ? We are told that generally, the exam grades have improved. Young people obtain higher grades in more subjects than in previous generation. Most vancancies have a minimum requirement of a University degree. So the fact that our unemployment rate is quite low seems to indicate a highly educated workforce. Maybe this is the reason for employers to be more selective, and they can afford to be.

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